It is already known to us that onbar backs up some critical administrative files during storage space backup. These critical files are as follows:

- The onconfig file

- UNIX: The sqlhosts file

- The ON-Bar emergency boot file: ixbar.servernum

- The server boot file: oncfg_servername.servernum

There may be a situation when you need to restore one of these files, for example: replace disks, restore to a second computer system (imported restore) etc. However, previously there was no easy way to restore these files from onbar backup. You need to depend on the Informix Technical Support to perform this operation.

Starting with Inofrmix vesion 12.10.xC2, you can restore the critical files that you backed up with onbar utility. Onbar cold restore has an option now to restore these files or you can only restore these file without perform the storate space restore.

Use 'onbar -r -cf yes' to restore critical file during cold restore. Alternatively, you can use 'onbar -r -cf only' to extract critical files while Informix server is offline.

Previously there was no easy way to monitor onbar archiving progress. It always a question, how long onbar process will take to complete an archive or how much time onbar will spend to transfer data between server, storage manager and vice versa.

Informix introduce two new configuration parameters to help onbar monitoring.

BAR_PROGRESS_FREQ

BAR_PERFORMANCE

BAR_PROGRESS_FREQThe BAR_PROGRESS_FREQ configuration parameter specifies, in minutes, the frequency of the progress messages in the bar activity log for backup and restore operations.

For example, if BAR_PROGRESS_FREQ is set to 5, onbar reports the percentage of the object backed up or restored every five minutes. Following is an excerpt of bar activity log that showing progress of rootdbs dbspace backup:

The default value of BAR_PROGRESS_FREQ is 0. If the value set to 0, onbar does not write any progress messages to the bar activity log.

The BAR_PROGRESS_FREQ value can’t less than five minute for monitoring onbar progress.

If ON–Bar cannot determine the size of the backup or restore object, it reports the number of transfer buffers sent to the database server instead of the percentage of the object backed up or restored.

BAR_PERFORMANCE

The BAR_PERFORMANCE configuration parameter specifies the type of performance statistics to report, and write them to the bar activity log for backup and restore operations.

For example, if BAR_PERFORMANCE is set to 3, onbar reports the time spent transferring data between the Informix server and the storage manager, in the bar activity log.

The default value of BAR_PERFORMANCE is 0. If the value set to 0, onbar does not report any performance statistics to the bar activity log.

Valid values of BAR_PERFORMANCE are 0,1,2 or 3.

0 - turn performance monitoring off

1 - display the time spent transferring data between the server and storage manager

2 - display sub-second accuracy in the timestamps

3 - display both timestamps and transfer statistics

Both BAR_PROGRESS_FREQ and BAR_PERFORMANCE configuration parameters take effect while onbar process starts.